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I first started reading Alexander Cockburn in 1980. Until then, I didn't know that it was kosher to write with such verve and venom. For a young, aspiring political writer, it was a real rabbit trick. And I wanted to learn how.

Throughout the 1980s, Cockburn, more than any other writer in America, flashed a light on Reagan's shameful support for the death squads in El Salvador and his illegal war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Cockburn had no use for Democratic Presidents, either. He criticized Jimmy Carter for his East Timor policy. And he excoriated Bill Clinton for destroying welfare and for pushing through his punitive crime bill.

"If ever there was a false populist, it was Clinton," he said.

Cockburn also saw through Obama before almost anyone else.

"I've never heard a politician so desperate not to offend conventional elite opinion while pretending to be fearless and forthright," he wrote in December 2006 in CounterPunch, the publication he co-edited with Jeffrey St. Clair.

I didn't always agree with Cockburn -- he was daffy on global warming -- but he was right and courageous and deft about almost everything else. We were fortunate to publish him occasionally in The Progressive.

I met him a couple times, and he didn't take himself too seriously. But he took his job seriously: to strip the clothes off of emperors everywhere.

2. Gore Vidal

I never met Gore Vidal. But I admired his fearlessness, and the joy he took in throwing spitballs at the powerful from his aristocratic rocking chair.

Vidal was a romantic believer in democracy, but America kept breaking his heart.

He also excoriated the press. "Our media has collapsed," he told Barsamian. "When you've got a press like we have, you no longer have an informed citizenry."

Vidal, an atheist, was a citizen grown weary. Toward the end of his life, according to the AP, he said: "There is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all."

3. George McGovern

The news that George McGovern died hit me hard. He was one of my first political heroes. When I was a fourteen-year-old kid, I passed out McGovern bumper stickers on the main street of my hometown. I greatly admired his opposition to the war in Vietnam and his programs for economic and social justice.

Then, when I came to The Progressive, I saw the powerful writing he did for this magazine over many years. Here's a snippet from a piece of his in September 1969 called "Vietnam: The Time Is Now": "I plead for us to declare our independence of this monstrous folly. Let us in the name of God and our own history end the slaughter and devastation that at once drain the blood of both Vietnam and America."

McGovern also was outspoken in assailing poverty in this country and hunger worldwide. He had a vision of a more just world, and he did all he could to try to bring it about.

He also dealt with tragedy, haunted as he was by the death of his adult daughter, Terry McGovern. She died in Madison, Wisconsin, near my first apartment.

So when he grappled with this in his book, Terry: My Daughter's Life-and-Death Struggle with Alcoholism, I gained even more respect for him. It's the saddest book I've ever read.

George McGovern was a great progressive, and a very decent man.

4. Adrienne Rich

Adrienne Rich was America's post-war poet laureate. Not single-handedly (and oh, how she would recoil from such a description, since she took pains to acknowledge the contributions of so many other pathbreaking writers) but with bravery and constancy, she pried open the doors of poetry to usher in the voices of women, lesbians, and people of color. She demanded admittance for the social and the political.

She despised oppressions of every kind, and hurled herself against them. In her early 1980s poem "Sources," she describes herself as a "woman with a mission, not to win prizes/but to change the laws of history."

In her last couple of decades, she wrestled with America itself in a time "when the name of compassion/was changed to the name of guilt/when to feel with a human stranger/was declared obsolete." (From "And Now" in Dark Fields of the Republic: Poems 1991-1995.)

She referred to our "moribund democracy" in The School Among the Ruins, and she wrote about the grotesqueness of U.S. support for Central American killers, she decried the immorality of the Iraq Wars, and she did not shy away from discussing the suffering of the Palestinians.

I had the pleasure of meeting Adrienne Rich twice. Once, when I went out to talk with her in Santa Cruz in September 1993 for the interview The Progressive published in January 1994.

A couple of years later we met for lunch in Madison (improbably, she had a cheeseburger). Both times she was welcoming and wise, courteous and inquisitive.

I'll miss her personal kindness, and I'll miss the opportunity to read whatever insights, and sample whatever art, she left unpublished. Feminism, the gay rights movement, and the entire progressive movement will miss her leadership. America will miss her stalwart conscience.

Now's a great time to subscribe to The Progressive magazine. You'll get a FREE copy of our 2013 "Hidden History of the United States" calendar when you subscribe for just $14.97 for the whole year. That's 75% off the newsstand price, and the calendar is yours for free. Just click here.

By Wendell Berry

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion—put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Wendell Berry is a poet, farmer, and environmentalist in Kentucky. This poem, first published in 1973, is reprinted by permission of the author and appears in his “New Collected Poems” (Counterpoint).